The Fear Profiteers

Billions of dollars in profit now depend on insiders maintaining US society in a state of overhyped alert that demands increasingly costly technology. Maintaining these profits requires a population conditioned by a theater of fear.
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OXFORD - Just when it seemed that America's "Homeland Security state" could not get more surreal, the United States Transportation Security Administration has rolled out a costly Scylla and Charybdis at major airports: either you accept dangerous doses of radiation and high-resolution imaging of your naked body, or, worried about the health risks of cumulative radiation, you opt out of the new full-body x-ray machines (rapidly dubbed "porno-scanners").

But if you opt out, you are now subjected, as I was last week, to an extraordinarily sexualized and invasive "pat-down" by TSA officials. "I will now touch your private parts," a very uncomfortable female TSA official said to me when I flew out of New York's Kennedy Airport. And, sure enough, I experienced the invasive touching of genitals and breasts that is now standard policy for US travelers.

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